Cinema Sunday: Night Nurse and Girl Missing

From 1934 to 1968, Hollywood films had to adhere to the Hays Code, also known as the Motion Picture Production Code overseen by Will H. Hays.  

The code was a set of industry guidelines for the self-censorship of content that was applied to most motion pictures released by major studios in the United States from 1934 to 1968. 

Today, Cinema Sunday takes a look at a couple of movies made before that Hays Code got a stranglehold on Hollywood.

First up is Night Nurse, a 1931 film directed by William A. Wellman, and starring Barbara Stanwyck and in an early supporting role, Clark Gable. 

Barbara Stanwyck is Lora Hart who enters a nurse training program and becomes friends and a roommate with Miss Maloney.  Which affords us some pre-code scenes of the two young women in their lingerie as they change clothes.  

Lora gets stuck on night duty in the emergency room where she treats a bootlegger named Mortie for a gunshot wound. He persuades her to not report the wound to the police as required by law. 

After finishing her training, Lora is hired as a private nurse for two sick children, Desney and Nanny Ritchey. 

Their mother spends most of her time drunk and does not give  a single god damn about her kids. What Mrs. Ritchey does care about is her infatuation with her brutish chauffeur Nick (Clark Gable). 

The Ritchey family physician is "society doctor" and drug addict Milton Ranger whose "treatment" of the children is causing them to starve to death. 

Here's the skinny on what's going on: Nanny and Desney have a trust fund from their late father. Nick has already killed their older sister and with Dr. Ranger's help, he's going to kill  Nanny and Desney. When they're dead, the trust fund would go to their mom, Nick marries the mom, then he kills her...

Oh, this son of a bitch needs to be put down.

Mortie repays Lora's favor by running interference on Nick while Lora gets a trusted doctor friend to intervene and save the children. 

Mortie told his buddies what kind of a guy Nick is and gangsters don't like nobody who hurts kids.  We see an ambulance deliver a corpse dressed in a chauffeur's uniform to the hospital's morgue.

Lora and Mortie end the movie happy that they saved the kids and Nick ain't gonna hurt nobody no more.  

So what happens in Night Nurse that could not have happened after the Hays code went into effect. 

• People breaking the law with no consequences.  
• Seeing what women have on under the clothes. Oh, the horror! 
• A drunk on her ass mom who doesn't care about her kids. 
• Violent physical assaults, especially against women. 
• A disreputable doctor. 
• A gangster helps save the day and not being punished for his crimes. 

Night Nurse can be a hard film to watch, especially knowing those kids are being tortured and starved to death by alleged adults who they count on to care for them.  

But Night Nurse can also be a lot of fun, especially watching a young Barbara Stanwyck as Lora, strong and resilient against a world that is aligned against her but Lora is smart and resourceful and woe unto anyone who would underestimate her. 

Our next pre-Code classic is Girl Missing from 1933 about two women stranded in Palm Beach becoming involved in the case of a new bride who goes missing on her wedding night.

Kay Curtis (Glenda Farrell) and June Dale (Mary Brian) are two showgirls living in a Palm Beach hotel. A plan to finagle a millionaire into paying their hotel bill goes awry and leaves Kay & June with no money to pay the bill or get out of town.  

They spot Daisy, a fellow showgirl they used to know who is engaged to Henry, a young millionaire. They figure Daisy's hooked up well enough to do them a solid. 

But Daisy acts like she has no idea who Kay and June are. Oh she's married into money and now too good to remember she used to be a showgirl too? 

Raymond, a former boyfriend of Daisy's, shows up and offers to help the girls out, paying their hotel bill and springing for a pair of train tickets to get them out of town. Well, isn't that nice of him?

Except Kay & June miss the train.  

Later, Henry and Daisy get married but on their wedding night, Daisy disappears from their hotel room and in the hotel's garden outside is the dead body of a gangster named Jim Hendricks.  

Henry offers up a reward for Daisy's safe return. Kay & June figure to take on the case and collect that reward money.  

OK, to make a loooong story short, there's all sorts of shenanigans where Daisy reappears and we discover she's been up to no good with a convoluted scheme she cooked up with Raymond and Jim to get Henry's money.  

Daisy and Raymond are arrested, Henry gives Kay the reward money and a marriage proposal to June who he has fallen in love with or some damn thing.  

Whew! That's over. This film is riddled with plot holes and contrivances and well, damn it, it's a mess. There's not a lot of pre-code scandal going on although I believe there is at least one scene where Kay and June change clothes and we get to see their naughty unmentionables.  

And probably Kay and June would've given Hays a wheezing fit of the vapors with their hard drinking, fast partying ways. Other than June getting engaged at the end, these two women mostly escape the expectations of the way women are "supposed" to behave.  

Next week, Cinema Sunday continues with another post about 2 more movies that got made before the harsh limits of censorship took hold of Hollywood.